Woman's World - 023 Life of Simple Emuna

A Mother: “Aim/Amen/Emunah”

We will try to explain, with the help of Hashem, a little about what the role of the Jewish woman is, and to explain this as much as we can in a way that it will affect us practically.

The first woman in history was Chavah. Chavah was called the aim kol chai, the mother of all living beings. Our Sages teach us that the word aim (אם) mother, is from the word amen (אמן)  which is also related to the word emunah (אמונה)  which is also related to the word neemanus(נאמנות), loyalty.

What is the special neemanus\loyalty that the Jewish woman possesses? Don’t all people possess the trait of loyalty? What is the concept of emunah?

The word aim  (אם)contains the letters aleph  (א)and mem (מ) . The aleph here stands for the word adam (אדם), which means “person.” The letter mem stands for the word mekabel, a “receiver.” The word amen has in it the letter nun, which stands for the word noisen, giver; the word amen thus contains aleph, mem, and nun, which alludes to how we become a complete person – first we are a receiver, and then we become a giver.

Shlomo HaMelech says in Mishlei (chapter 2), “Ki im l’binah tikra”, “For only (im) if you call out to understanding.” The Sages read the word im as aim, mother. In other words, the possuk is saying that a woman is comprised of these two words – aim, and im.

What is the aspect of “aim” in a woman, and what is the aspect of “im” in woman? Im means “if”, which implies that there are two choices to choose from. This is alluding to our power of bechira, free will.

Woman in Hebrew is called “nekaivah”, which means nekev, hole. A hole receives what is put into it; this represents how a woman receives from her husband. But if a woman eventually becomes a giver, she reflects amen – which implies “giver”.

This is the concept, and now let us explain what this will mean for us, in a practical way.

Two Stages Of Our Life – Receiving and Giving

Everyone has bechirah, free will. What is our free will? What do we choose? Of course, we choose if we will get up out of bed in the morning, if we will daven, and if we will make a beracha before we eat. But Rav Dessler zt”l explained the depth of free will: that it is the power to choose if we will be receivers, or if we will be givers. In whatever do, either we are right now choosing to take something for ourselves, or we are choosing to give something to others.

A person is born as a receiver, and he must become a giver. It’s hard for us to learn how to give. But not only is it hard to give - even our initial stage, receiving, is hard! The fact that we are receivers is a stage we must first go through in life in order to be able to give, and this first stage in our life, receiving, is actually harder than learning how to give. Let us explain what we mean.

We Must Be Proper “Receivers” In Order To Then Become “Givers”

It’s hard for us to “receive”.

We are not referring to the fact that it’s hard for us overcome our pleasure in receiving gifts and compliments from others (although that, too, is hard). The depth of the hardship in receiving from others is that it is for hard us to be able to accept things in the proper way! What we really mean is that it is hard for us to accept what’s going on in our life. Not only is it hard for us to give; it’s hard for us to accept as well, and this is even harder than learning how to become givers!

It is hard for us to accept certain facts about our life - because we are missing emunah (faith in G-d).

When everything is going good for us, it’s easy to accept what’s coming our way. When everyone is being pleasant to you, when your husband speaks to you nicely, when your children are acting good in school and they’re getting good grades, when you are receiving warmth and compliments from others – then life is good, and we have an easy time with our life. But what happens when things aren’t going on our way? What happens when your husband comes home grumpy? What happens when your kids aren’t doing well in school? Can we accept that easily? It’s usually very hard for us to accept these situations. And when we can’t accept these situations, we will have a very, very hard time living our life.

The only way how we can accept our difficulties in life is if we live with emunah. Emunah is a power in our soul in which we can get used to problems, on a regular basis, and accept them.

The first commandment was “I am Hashem”; it was about emunah. Emunah is not just to remember every day when we say Shema about how Hashem took us out of Egypt (although that, too, is also commendable); Emunah is that every single day, all the time, we live with our Emunah.

When we have Emunah, our life will become clearer.

Some people are bothered: “How is it possible for me to have Emunah the whole day?!” But the true way that a Jew is supposed to live is to have Emunah the entire day. Without this, it will be impossible to live our life! We all go through countless difficulties in our life. If we have Emunah, we will be able to survive; we will be at peace, and our lives will feel calm, no matter what we go through. The more we have Emunah, the happier we will become as well.

Of course, if someone attempts to transform himself overnight and start having Emunah all day, it is an unrealistic change. But you can start by having Emunah for 4-5 hours a day, and then you can eventually turn it into having Emunah all day.

Emunah helps us become “receivers”; it helps us become true receivers, because with Emunah, we can truly accept whatever comes our way. When we become true receivers, we will then be able to enter the second stage in our life, which is to become a giver – we will be able to truly give others. If we don’t develop our Emunah, then we never go through the first stage in our life properly, and then our giving to others won’t be true giving, because it will only be a superficial and undeveloped kind of giving.

Why Are Parents Not Seeing Progress With Their Children?

Parents are putting so much into their children, and the children still don’t always turn out good. The parents are terribly disappointed and upset: “How could this happen?? Didn’t we try so hard with our children??” But the painful answer to that while, yes, the parents gave endlessly to their children, it wasn’t with properly developed feelings of love and happiness. It was often with a frown and with unhappiness. This was all because the parents didn’t first work on their Emunah, and because they didn’t develop their own Emunah, all that they gave to their children was without true feeling.

Emunah is what develops us. Emunah helps us be able to give to others with our full heart; when we give to our children with our full heart, they will then feel our kindness, and then we will be truly successful with them. But without developing our Emunah, we aren’t able to give to our children with a full heart, and then our children don’t sense the love in all that we do for them.

In the end of the day, we all need a lot of siyata d’shmaya (Heavenly assistance) to have good children. But we will only get help from Heaven with our children if we do our part. Our part is to develop our Emunah – and then we can daven to Hashem to help us.

Emunah: The Art of Acceptance

Emunah encompasses every matter in our life – from childhood until our old age. We have to able to accept everything in our life, big or small – from the time we are children, until the end of our life.

Avraham Avinu was tested ten times; the final test was that he was told that he must sacrifice his son. What was the point of all these tests? Why did he have to be tested ten times? It was to test his Emunah, that Emunah has to span our entire life – every aspect.

If we want to make this very practical in our life, every day for 2-3 minutes sit and think about emunah peshutah (simple, non-intellectual faith in G-d). Think simply: “Who created the world? Who runs the world? Hashem. Is there anything He’s not taking care of? No. He is taking care of every little aspect going on in the world…”

After getting used to this, you can progress to another stage. Throughout the day, prepare yourself to accept something that doesn’t go your way – and accept it happily, lovingly, from emunah peshutah in Hashem.

Do this every day – ingrain in yourself each day emunah peshutah. You can’t do it a whole day, but you can do it for 2-3 minutes a day. During this 2-3 minutes of emunah peshutah each day, don’t delve into this intellectually. You don’t have to learn any of the words of our Chazal or our sefarim for this; just ingrain yourself with emunah peshutah, by accepting something each day, happily and lovingly.

If you keep doing this, you are going in the way of our forefathers – in the way of “maaminim b’nei maaminim”, “believers, the sons of believers”. Without emunah, we are missing the main point of all Judaism. It’s nice to do chessed for others and to have good middos, but if we don’t have Emunah, then we are missing the main thing in our life.

So for a few minutes a day, have emunah peshutah. Think about all the events that happened in your life, from your early childhood until today, and accept every painful event that you went through in your life with emunah. And accept each thing lovingly and happily. This will bring you to the true happiness of your soul, and it will make your lifestyle resemble that of our great ancestors, who lived with emunah peshutah.

Without emunah, our lives are empty. Every Jew is full of mitzvos – even the most wicked Jew does many mitzvos; Chazal say that “even the empty ones among them [the Jewish people] are full of as many mitzvos as the amount of seeds in a pomegranate.” In other words, wicked people do lots of mitzvos too, but because they’re missing emunah, they are still considered empty. The lesson we learn from this statement [concerning the wicked] is that a Jew’s life is empty without emunah.

Letting Emunah Become A Basic Part of Our Life

Throughout the day, we spend so much of our day thinking about our worries: our job, our health, our kids, etc. We spend so much time in our imagination – often about things that we have no idea why we are thinking about them. Even as we sleep at night, we dream about these worries.

How about spending some of that thinking about emunah peshutah? We spend so much time thinking anyway; why not use just 2-3 minutes each day to think about emunah peshutah? The more we think about emunah peshutah throughout the day, even our dreams at night will be about emunah peshutah!

Let emunah peshutah become part of your life. If we go our whole life – 70 or 80 years without even thinking once about emunah peshutah - what kind of life is that? Without emunah peshutah, we never live the true meaning of a Jew’s life.

We are describing here the true way how life is supposed to look like, and there is nothing new here. These words are totally practical and applicable to all our lives.

May we merit to be truly be close to Hashem and do His will; may we merit to accept what happens in our life – man or woman – and then we will be able to truly give to others from a pure place in our soul, a place that is happy and full of true love for others – and then our children will get truly nourished from what we put into them.